2
Climate and the Colonial Condition

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Like meat, we keep better here [in the hills].
—Emily Eden, Up the Country

The initial reason for seeking sanctuary in the Indian highlands was to escape the heat of the plains. To persons born and bred in the cool maritime climate of the British Isles, heat was not merely a cause of discomfort; it was a trope for all that was alien and hostile about the tropics. British anxieties about hot climates have been traced to their earliest encounters with tropical environments.^[1] Although beckoned by the apparent natural abundance of the tropical world, they also were repelled by what their personal experiences persuaded them was a correlation between the heat of the tropics and disease, decay, and death. That British sojourners had ample reason to fear for their lives is borne out by mortality statistics: the cost of entry into these new and rich disease environments was high.^[2] Yet Western medicine in the tropics failed to attribute this deadly tariff to microbic agents until the late nineteenth century, clinging instead to a climatic or environmental paradigm that emphasized the action of heat.^[3]

[1] See Karen Ordahl Kupper man, "Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience," William and Mary Quarterly , 3d ser., 41 (April 1984): 213-40.

[2] See David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993), ch. 2; and Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989).

[3] Arnold makes this point in Colonizing the Body , 23-34. I have traced these attitudes through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in my essay, "The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics," in

Imperialism and the Natural World , ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester, 1990), 118-40.

As one of the leading textbooks of tropical medicine in the nineteenth century put it, "Heat is in fact the great moving power of all other subordinate sources of disease."^[4]

As long as the British in India were restricted to coastal enclaves, the sea supplied the principal means of relief from the oppressive temperatures that were held responsible for so many ailments. Invalids frequently took berths on ships that shuttled along the coast or sailed to Cape Town, Mauritius, and other ports. It was not merely the destination but the voyage itself, with its enforced leisure and exposure to cool ocean breezes, which was thought to offer recuperative benefits.

By the early nineteenth century, however, the British were no longer clinging to the coast; they were ruling the greater part of the subcontinent. Their imperial position drew them in ever-increasing numbers to the interior, where the looming expanses of the Himalayas and the highlands of central and southern India offered enticing alternatives to the sea.^[5] Colonial authorities began to probe these newly accessible mountain domains. Although strategic and commercial considerations influenced their efforts, especially in the Himalayas, the principal impetus behind these probes was the desire to find refuge from the heat and disease of the plains. This desire was heightened by the devastating cholera epidemic that swept through India in 1817-21.^[6] As a senior member of the Indian Medical Board observed in the early 1820s, "The subject [of highland sanitaria] generally has awakened great anxiety on the part of the Government."^[7]

The preoccupation with climate and health is evident in the circumstances that led to the founding of some of the leading hill stations in colonial India.

[4] Sir James Ranald Martin, Influence of Tropical Climates in Producing the Acute Endemic Diseases of Europeans , 2d ed. (London, 1861), 45. The original author of this highly influential book was rather more subtle in assessing the role of heat: "From heat spring all those effects which originally predispose to the reception or operation of other moribific causes." James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions , 3d ed. (New York, 1826), 389 (emphasis in original).

[5] For general discussions of the medical rationale for the establishment of hill stations, see Nora Mitchell, "The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal," University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper 141, 1972, ch. 2; and Curtin, Death by Migration , 47-50.

[6] See Arnold, Colonizing the Body , ch. 4; and David Arnold, "Cholera and Colonialism in British India," Past and Present 113 (Nov. 1986): 118-51.

[7] Dr. Olgilvy, c. 1824, in F/4/898/23460, Board's Collection, IOL.

Southern India's Nilgiri plateau, rising some eight thousand feet above sea level, was penetrated by several parties of British officials in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. After touring the area in 1819, John Sullivan, collector for Coimbatore district, began a personal campaign to persuade the government of Madras that the location's "unusually temperate and healthy" climate made it ideal as a "resort of Invalids." In 1821 the medical board of the presidency ordered three assistant surgeons to investigate these claims. Their reports persuaded the board that "we fully anticipate very great advantages from a resort to these Hills," and it recommended that fifty invalid soldiers be sent there to test the region's salubrity. Independently, Sullivan and other officials from neighboring districts established summer residences at Ootacamund, nestled in the heart of the Nilgiris. This nascent community soon attracted a stream of visitors in search of health and leisure. Among them was Sir Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras, who stayed at Ootacamund in 1826. A year later the station was officially recognized as a sanitarium by Munro's successor, Stephen Lushington, who approved the construction of bungalows and a hospital and the appointment of two medical officers and an apothecary. A third medical officer was sent to Kotagiri, a smaller settlement in the eastern part of the plateau. Even though official support for the medical station at Ootacamund was withdrawn in 1834, the reputation of the Nilgiris as a location for the convalescence of Europeans had already been "completely established," according to J. Annesley of the Madras medical board.^[8]

At the same time that John Sullivan was establishing the first European house at Ootacamund, Captain Charles Kennedy, the political agent for the hill states along what was then the northwest frontier of British India, was building a timber dwelling on a magnificently forested ridge known as Simla. His predecessor had discovered the site during a hunting expedition in 1819, and Kennedy decided to make it his permanent residence three

[8] The remarks by Sullivan and the medical board may be found in F/4/702/ 19060 and F/4/771/19407, Board's Collection, IOL. Much of the official correspondence on the establishment of health sanitaria in the Nilgiris is reprinted in Parliamentary Papers (PP), Papers Relative to the Formation of a Sanitarium on the Neilgherries for European Troops , Session 729, XLI, 1850, including the comment by Annesley (p. 54). John Sullivan's role in the establishment of Ootacamund is described by Paul Hockings, "John Sullivan of Ootacamund," in Journal of Indian History Golden Jubilee Volume , ed. T. K. Ravindran (Trivandrum, 1973), 863-71. Also see Sir Frederick Price, Ootacamund: A History (Madras, 1908); and Judith Theresa Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station: The Representation of British Authority in Ootacamund" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1990).

years later. He explained to his superiors: "the climate is particularly salubrious, and I rejoice to say my health has derived infinite benefit from my residence in it."^[9] This retreat quickly became a magnet for invalided officers and other Europeans in upper India seeking rest cures. In 1827 Lord Amherst became the first in a long line of governors-general and viceroys who would make the station their summer home. The government formally acquired Simla in 1830 through an exchange agreement with the maharaja of Patiala and the rana of Keonthal, the joint proprietors of the land. By this date some thirty British houses dotted the ridge, and Simla had acquired a name for itself as "the resort of the rich, the idle, and the invalid."^[10]

Darjeeling presented a more complicated history than Simla because of its strategically sensitive location. It came to the attention of the British government when Captain G. S. Lloyd and J. W. Grant, commercial resident at Maldah, visited the area in 1827 and recommended its acquisition as a site for a sanitarium. Lord William Bentinck, then governor-general of India, was favorably disposed to the recommendation, noting in a minute "the great saving of European life and the consequent saving of expense that will accrue both to individuals and to the state." He was restrained, however, by the objections of Charles Metcalfe and other members of the governor-general's council, who feared the response of the Nepalese to this encroachment on their eastern border.^[11] Several years later, after enjoying stays at Simla and Mussoorie and failing to establish a satisfactory sanitarium at Cherrapunji in Assam, Bentinck authorized Captain Lloyd to persuade the raja of Sikkim to cede Darjeeling to the British, regardless of "the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the Nepauli Durbar."^[12] The government's letter to the raja sought to assure him that "it is solely on account of the climate that the possession of the place is deemed desirable, [because] the cold . . . is understood . . . as peculiarly beneficial to the European con-

[9] Quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, Simla and the Simla Hill States under British Protection 1815-1835 (Lahore, 1961), II.

[10] Victor Jacquemont, Letters from India , vol. 1 (London, 1834), 226. The origins of Simla have been most recently detailed by Raja Bhasin, Simla: The Summer Capital of British India (New Delhi, 1992); Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla (Delhi, 1990); and Vipin Pubby, Simla Then and Now: Summer Capital of the Raj (New Delhi, 1988).

[11] See minutes on Darjeeling, 17 June 1830-17 October 1833, nos. 1-6, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, INA. Bentinck's minute is reprinted in C. H. Philips, ed., The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck , vol. 1 (Oxford, 1977), 457.

[12] Minute by Bentinck, 8? January 1835, no. 1, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, INA.

Figure 1.
Eden Sanitarium, Darjeeling. From Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Company,
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. Illustrated Guide for Tourists (London, 1896).

stitution when debilitated by the Heat of the plains."^[13] Although it is clear that the British also hoped Darjeeling would provide a bridgehead for trade with Tibet, health considerations predominated. Lord Auckland, who succeeded Bentinck as governor-general, reiterated his predecessor's commitment to Darjeeling, proclaiming that he was "unwilling to abandon an object of so much importance to . . . the European inhabitants of Bengal as that of giving them means of access to a healthy climate within one third of the distance from Calcutta to Simla."^[14] The enthusiastic attention the Calcutta press gave to the government's efforts demonstrates that the Europeans in Bengal did indeed support the development of Darjeeling as a health resort. And with the appointment of Dr. Arthur Campbell of the Bengal Medical Service as superintendent of the station in 1839, its transformation into the most popular mountain sanitarium in the eastern Himalayas had begun (Figure 1).^[15]

[13] Government of India to Raja of Sikkim, 11 February 1835, no. 111, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, INA. Also see the remarks in the ensuing treaty, quoted in Newman's Guide to Darjeeling and Neighbourhood , 6th ed. (Calcutta, 1919), 52.

[14] Minute by Auckland, 16 April 1836, no. 21, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, INA.

[15] Evidence of the public interest in Darjeeling can be found in the newspaper articles reprinted in H. Hosten, "The Centenary of Darjeeling," Bengal: Past and Present 39, pt. 2, no. 78 (April-June 1930): 106-23; and Fred Pinn, The Road to Destiny: Darjeeling Letters 1839 (Calcutta, 1986). For general histories of Darjeeling, see E. C. Dozey, A Concise History of the Darjeeling District since 1835 (Calcutta, 1922); and Jahar Sen, Darjeeling: A Favoured Retreat (New Delhi, 1989).

All three presidencies sought health resorts in the hills, and an element of bureaucratic rivalry suffused their efforts. Bengal, of course, could obtain access to the Himalayas, while Madras claimed jurisdiction over the Nilgiris, but Bombay held no territory of equivalent elevation within its domain. Some of its European community journeyed to the Nilgiris, but the desire to find a more accessible convalescent depot, as well as to be free of obligation to Madras officialdom, prompted an investigation of the Western Ghats south of Bombay city. In 1825 Major John Briggs, the British resident for the princely state of Satara, sent his ailing family to the nearby plateau of Mahabaleshwar (elevation 4,500 feet). His subsequent report to the Bombay medical board on the virtues of the location included the engaging claim that while its lower elevation made it considerably warmer than the Nilgiris, this effect had the advantage of causing less shock to the systems of new arrivals. The governor of Bombay, Sir John Malcolm, visited Mahabaleshwar in 1828, and his enthusiasm for the spot led the government to persuade the raja of Satara to give up the territory in exchange for a village. It soon became the principal hill station for the Bombay presidency.^[16]

Less than a decade after the first Englishmen had probed the mountain regions of India, then, several highland sites had gained recognition as salubrious retreats from the oppressive heat of the plains. "It is but of late years that public attention has been awakened to the vast advantages of climate which the elevated tracts of this country represent to its European possessors," declared Mahabaleshwar's medical officer in 1830. He gave thanks for "those resources for the preservation and recovery of health, which nature has thus bountifully placed within our reach."^[17] These sentiments, buoyant with the sense of discovery, were widely shared. Here at last a remedy for the fearful cost of residence in the tropics seemed within reach.

Much of the initial euphoria was created by the testimonials of visitors, who praised the invigorating effects of the highland climate. But anecdotal evidence went only so far: authorities demanded statistical proof of the health benefits of the hills. Bentinck, in an 1833 minute, had argued on the

[16] See John Briggs's letter to the Bombay medical board (31 May 1826), reprinted in Perin Bharucha, Mahabaleswar: The Club 1881-1981 (Bombay, c. 1981), app. B; as well as the report on Mahabaleshwar in F/4/1117/29948, Board's Collection, IOL, and the letter from Malcolm to Bentinck in Philips, Correspondence , vol. 1, 271.

[17] James Murray, Account of Malcolm Pait, on the Mahableshwur Hills (Bombay, 1863), 1. Murray was the Bombay medical-service surgeon appointed to the Mahabaleshwar sanitarium. His account was originally written in 1830.

basis of medical records from army cantonments in various parts of Bengal that British soldiers stationed closer to the mountains had lower death rates than their counterparts in the lowlands, suggesting a correlation between elevation and survival.^[18] But evidence from the hill stations themselves was still fragmentary. Government surgeons stationed in the hills had just begun accumulating and interpreting morbidity and mortality data about their patients. Intent upon demonstrating the relationship between climate and health, they also began to keep careful records of temperature, rainfall, humidity, wind, barometric pressure, and other measures of climatic conditions. The issue, however, was reducible to a single calculation—the death rate.

The preoccupation with mortality rates had particular relevance for the army, whose European ranks had been repeatedly decimated by disease in the first half of the nineteenth century.^[19] Virtually all the statistical data concerning the health benefits of hill stations derived from military inquiries. In 1845, for example, Edward Balfour, a Bengal Army surgeon, compared mortality figures for British troops on the plains and in the Nilgiris. His evidence indicated that the annual death rate for the European forces in the three Indian presidencies averaged between 52 and 63 per 1,000 in the late 1820s (compared to 15.9 per: 1,000 in Britain). Yet for army officers invalided to the Nilgiris between 1831 and 1834, the rate stood at 27 per 1,000. Balfour never disaggregated the mortality rate for officers in the plains: if he had done so, the contrast with the Nilgiri rate would have been far less stark. He did acknowledge that the figures for enlisted men at the convalescent station in the Nilgiris remained high but argued with some justification that this result was to be expected from a group that had come to the hills because of illness. Whatever the epidemiological weaknesses of Balfour's study, it made a more substantial case than ever before that the hill stations provided real medical benefits to British troops.^[20]

Two years later a special committee appointed by the governor-general reviewed the medical evidence from highland sanitaria. Its conclusion was unequivocal: the death rate for European troops stationed in the hills was half that of their counterparts in the plains.^[21] By midcentury the medical

[18] Philips, Correspondence , vol. 2, 1169-71.

[19] For mortality rates among British soldiers in India, see Curtin, Death by Migration , Table 1.1, passim.

[20] Edward Balfour, Statistical Data for Forming Troops and Maintaining Them in Health in Different Climates and Localities (London, 1845).

[21] I have been unable to obtain this 1847 report. It is referred to by the court of directors in a letter to the governor-general, 30 May 1849, in E/4/800/639-43,

India and Bengal Dispatches, IOL. It also forms the basis for the defense of hill sanitaria by the inspector general of hospitals in Duncan MacPherson, Reports on Mountain and Marine Sanitaria (Madras, 1862), 31.

efficacy of convalescence stations in the highlands had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of most military authorities. In 1860 the government of India circulated a letter to regional officials declaring that the establishment of hill sanitaria for European troops was "of so important a nature, that . . . no delay should be allowed to take place in doing all that can be done."^[22] In 1863 the Parliamentary commission charged with investigating the health of the army in India was sufficiently impressed with the medical evidence concerning hill stations to recommend that a third of the British forces be stationed there on a rotating basis, and only strategic considerations prevented it from proposing an even higher percentage for billeting in the hills.^[23] Medical opinion in British India was now all but unanimous in its endorsement of hill stations as sanitaria.

Yet the nature of this endorsement demands close scrutiny. Doctors took great care to distinguish those disorders that seemed to respond to convalescence in the hills from those that did not. They consistently cautioned against sending to hill sanitaria patients who suffered from heart disease, epilepsy, rheumatism, bronchitis, and syphilis—illnesses that in some cases were aggravated by high altitudes or cool temperatures but above all were not classifiable as afflictions associated with tropical conditions. Although a few hill stations eventually acquired reputations as tuberculosis sanitaria (notably Almora, Kurseong, Hazaribagh, and Panchgani), this disease was rarely mentioned in the medical literature, probably because it was less deadly to the British in India than at home. The greatest menaces for the British in nineteenth-century India were malaria, cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis, and dysentery. Although all these diseases occurred in Europe, their virulence in India made it possible to regard them as tropical afflictions. As such, they were most often invoked in medical assessments of the hills.

Remote highland retreats certainly offered greater immunity from dangerous contagions than the densely populated regions of the subcontinent. The etiology of cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis, and dysentery was directly

[22] F. D. Atkinson, secretary to the government of India, Military Department, in Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Military Department) , no. 1: Report on the Extent and Nature of the Sanitary Establishments for European Troops in India (Calcutta, 1862), 138. Some insight into the importance authorities gave to highland sanitaria can be gained from the letters and reports reprinted in this volume and two subsequent ones published in Selections from the Records .

[23] PP, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary State of the Army in India , XIX, 1863, esp. 150-53.

traceable to environments degraded by human habitation. Soldiers crammed together in unsanitary barracks naturally faced greater risks than did most Europeans. As the French traveler Victor Jacquemont observed: "Europeans are seldom [cholera's] victims, especially gentlemen ; but the soldiers of the European corps, all Irish . . . , are swept away by it in great numbers."^[24] Prior to the late nineteenth century, doctors may not have fully understood the role that contaminated food and water played in the spread of these diseases, but they did appreciate the fact that the retreat to sparsely populated mountain areas reduced the risk of infection. The early reports on the Nilgiris pointedly noted the absence of cholera, which had only recently assumed fearsome proportions in the subcontinent.^[25] And medical officials soon observed that the residents of hill stations were less likely to suffer attacks of malaria than their counterparts on the plains, even though they did not understand until the end of the century that the disease occurred in the habitat of the anopheles mosquito.

Health authorities, however, were not able to proclaim the highlands fully free from the so-called zymotic diseases of the tropics. Some of the hill stations at lower elevations were within the anopheles mosquito zone, and visitors to the others often had to pass through dense belts of forest (known as the terai along the base of the Himalayas) where it was possible to contract an especially virulent strain of malaria carried by Anopheles fluviatilis .^[26] Often, of course, those infected manifested no symptoms until after their arrival in the hills, thereby confounding claims of environmental immunity. In midcentury, the inspector general of hospitals remained unpersuaded that hill stations lay beyond some obscure "fever range."^[27]

Cholera took little time to find its way to the hill stations: it arrived with the troops, porters, and other transient parties that came up from the plains. Fanny Parks reported an outbreak of cholera in the Mussoorie-Landour bazaar around 1840 that caused most of the hill bearers to take flight.^[28] The reputations of Dharamsala and Murree, two predominantly military hill stations, were badly damaged by a series of cholera epidemics. The disease attacked Simla and its satellite stations in 1857, 1867, 1872, 1875, and on various occasions thereafter. It reached epidemic proportions in Shillong in

[24] Jacquemont, Letters , vol. 1, 207.

[25] Papers Relative to the Formation of a Sanitarium , 2, 45.

[26] Leonard Jan Bruce-Chwatt, Essential Malariology (London, 1980), 161-62.

[27] MacPherson, Reports on . . . Sanitaria , 33.

[28] Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque , vol. 2 (London, 1850), 253.

1879. By the end of the century, it had made an appearance in most hill stations.

As the growing populations of the hill stations began to overwhelm their rudimentary water and sewage systems in the late 1800s, water-borne diseases spread. Typhoid fever became endemic in Ootacamund and its neighbor Coonoor in the late 1860s, and many other hill stations were soon similarly afflicted. Outbreaks of dysentery grew increasingly frequent, and chronic diarrhea was common among the residents of hill stations. Its prevalence persuaded medical authorities that they faced a distinctive ailment, which they termed diarrhoea alba and attributed to such unlikely causes as the mica content of the water supply. The condition was known as "hill diarrhea" or "the Simla trots." Thus, as hill stations became more populated, their residents faced an escalating risk of contracting some of the very diseases they had sought to escape.^[29]

Moreover, prevention was one thing, and cure quite another. Although some medical authorities initially sought to show that the highland climate could restore the health of those afflicted with tropical maladies, experience taught them to temper such claims. The sallow sufferers of hepatitis gained little benefit from residence in the hills. Cholera attacked its victims so swiftly and aggressively that survival was usually determined in a matter of days, if not hours, which meant that those who sought recovery in a mountain sanitarium had already passed the crisis point. This was often true for dysentery as well. The highlands appeared to offer greater promise to malarial invalids, whose condition was usually less acute, but these patients were never entirely freed from the risk of further bouts of fever. Medical authorities quickly lost their illusions about the curative benefits of hill sanitaria. The medical board of Madras observed that the Nilgiris were "not well adapted for the cure of those chronic diseases attributable to a tropical climate." The author of a memorandum on the health of British

[29] For the outbreaks of cholera, see W. J. Moore, Health Resorts for Tropical Invalids in India, at Home, and Abroad (London, 1881), 28, 44; Punjab District Gazetteers, Rawalpindi District, 1907 , vol. 28A (Lahore, 1909), 251; W. Martin Towelle, Towelle's Hand Book and Guide to Simla (Simla, 1877), 44; and Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station," 174. Concerning contaminated water and the problem of typhoid in major hill stations, see R. S. Ellis, Report on the Stations of Ootacamund and Coonoor (Madras, 1865); J. L. Ranking, Report upon the Sanitary Condition of Ootacamund (Madras, 1868); C. J. Bamber, Report on an Outbreak of Enteric Fever in Simla during the Summer of 1904 (Lahore, 1904); and Report of the Simla Sanitary Investigation Committee (Simla, 1905). Hill diarrhea is discussed in the standard medical textbook, W. J. Moore, A Manual of the Diseases of India , 2d ed. (London, 1886), 167-73.

troops said the same for hill stations as a whole: "the climate of the mountains, invaluable in prevention, will not cure disease." And the Parliamentary commission on the sanitary state of the Indian Army concluded that "hill stations are not curative."^[30]

What, then, constituted the medical rationale for the hill sanitaria? As their preventative benefits diminished and their curative benefits proved illusory, health authorities increasingly stressed their value as places for convalescence from the physical enfeeblement that came in some measure from repeated attacks of disease but above all from prolonged exposure to the harsh climate of India. Those who, in the parlance of the period, had been "debilitated" by their long residence in the plains could expect to do best from withdrawal to the highlands. "The invalids who derive most benefit from a change to the Hills," observed the senior medical officer at Ootacamund, "are those who labour under no organic disease, but suffer from general debility, the result of a residence in the low country; these cases rally wonderfully and rapidly." Such was the medical magic of the hill stations. The reports from various mountain sites took on an increasingly common character. For Darjeeling's medical officer, the sanitarium was especially suited for patients suffering from "general debility, whether arising from a long residence in the plains or depending on tardy convalescence from fevers and other acute disease." A surgeon with the sanitary commission of Madras made the same point about Yercaud, a hill station in southern India: "it is not . . . to invalids suffering from organic disease that our mountain climates hold out much ground of hope; but rather to those who are simply exhausted in mind and body from prolonged exposure to a high temperature in the low country, and who need rest from work and a cooler air to breathe." Authors of general assessments of the hill stations, such as Dr. D. H. Cullimore in The Book of Climates , concurred: "it is as a restorative to those suffering from overwork, or exhausted by the heat of the plains, that tropical hill-stations are the most advantageous."^[31] This reasoning represented a shift in the medical advocacy of hill

[30] Papers Relative to the Formation of a Sanitarium , 66; memo by Dr. J. P. March in Selections from the Records of the Government of Bengal , no. 36, pt. 2: The Maghassani Hills as a Sanitarium (Calcutta, 1861), 12; and Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary State of the Army in India , 153.

[31] George Makay, Remarks on the Climate, with Advice to Invalids and Others Visiting the Neilgherry Hills (Madras, 1870), 27; Dr. H. Chapman in H. V. Bayley, Dorje-ling (Calcutta, 1838), 35; W. R. Cornish, "The Shervaroy Hills," in

The Hill Ranges of Southern India , ed. John Shortt (Madras, 1870-83), 34; D. H. Cullimore, The Book of Climates , 2d ed. (London, 1891), 13.

stations from the problematic grounds posed by a clinical assessment of climate and disease to a more socially resonant understanding of the effects of the tropics on the European.

The alacrity with which the British Indian medical establishment conferred invalid status upon those who complained of "debility," which often seemed to mean little more than a general sense of ennui, illustrates the social purposes that underlay the desire to invest the highlands with therapeutic value. It was not uncommon for European sojourners in the tropics to experience lethargy, irritability, depression, nervousness, insomnia, and various other vague symptoms, which were diagnosed in descriptive terms such as "Punjab head," "Burma head," "tropical fatigue," "tropical inertia," and "tropical amnesia." Nothing in the discourse of the doctors suggests that they regarded these maladies to be any less "real" than those of specific organic origin. Their reluctance to make such a distinction may have been due in part to the practical problems of diagnosis: it was seldom certain whether complaints of "debility" were manifestations of physiological disease or derived from psychological or other causes. Moreover, few physicians before the late nineteenth century would have seen the need to distinguish the psychological from the physiological.^[32] They treated both indiscriminately, and the mysteries of tropical maladies obscured the distinctions between the two even further. Whether the benefits of a stay in the hills were measurable in careful tabulations of clinic records or in vague expressions of well-being, medical authorities were equally prepared to appropriate the evidence within their own terms of reference and for their own professional advantage. And, in so doing, they spoke to issues that extended far beyond the conventional confines of their practice.

The most conspicuous reason for granting medical significance to the vague malaise that assailed Europeans in India was the scientific justification this supplied to what might otherwise have been regarded as merely a holiday in the hills. Particularly for members of the official community, the surest way to obtain occasional respite from their official responsibil-

[32] See Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800-1858 (London, 1991), 98, 142-47.

ities in the plain's oppressive heat was by securing a medical leave.^[33] The doctors who obliged them in this gambit were themselves servants of the colonial state, and their own experiences with the Indian climate heightened their understanding of their patients' desires to seek rest and relief in the highlands. One can detect the influence of personal experience in the assertion by W. J. Moore, surgeon general for the government of Bombay, that hill stations "be regarded not only as exciting a sanitary effect on the body, but also on the mind: the freedom from the harass of daily work and the change of scene and society, tending to raise and exhilarate the spirits, depressed by the continued influence of the heated plains."^[34]

Precedents for this medicalization of leisure can be found in Britain itself. English physicians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had given scientific legitimation to the seasonal migrations of the landed elite to spa towns such as Bath and Brighton, where they claimed that the mineral waters and the sea air and water were therapeutic. A similar body of professional advice arose in the nineteenth century in connection with the travels of the newly prosperous bourgeoisie to various Mediterranean locations.^[35] Like their counterparts in England, doctors in India provided the British elite who ruled the subcontinent with a medical validation for their social assemblages.

Yet the claims of medicine were more than a simple pretext for the exercise of leisure habits that aped fashions in Britain. As "the master narrative of scientific discourse" for the British in nineteenth-century India,^[36] medicine was the principal means by which they sought to understand the physical environment and to assess the risks it posed to their personal and communal well-being. What the surgeons and other medical authorities had to say about the therapeutic benefits of the hill stations illuminates the broad contours of concern by the British about their status as overlords in an alien land. When the doctors prescribed a "change of climate" for their debilitated patients, the literal and figurative meanings of this counsel were unalterably bound together. Flight from the climatic

[33] See D. G. Crawford, A History of the Indian Medical Service 1600-1913 , vol. 1 (London, 1914), ch. 19, for information about the requirements and conditions for leaves and furloughs.

[34] Moore, Health Resorts , 3.

[35] See Edmund W. Gilbert, Brighton: Old Ocean's Bauble (London, 1954), chs. 4, 5; and John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford, 1987), pt. 2.

[36] The phrase comes from Arnold, Colonizing the Body , 21.

perils of lowland India entailed flight from the labyrinth of social and cultural hazards that lurked within the colonial environment.

One route of access to these interwoven issues lies in the preoccupation with the problem of "degeneration." Official opinion in nineteenth-century India held that a European population could not be sustained on a permanent basis in the tropical climate of lowland India: colonists would degenerate and die out by the third generation.^[37] The high mortality rate among the British in India until the second half of the century certainly gave credence to this forecast, and because the problem of health seemed so closely connected to the issue of degeneration, members of the medical profession frequently assumed the role of authorities on the matter. James Johnson's The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions , the first important British textbook on tropical medicine published in the nineteenth century, opened with the assertion that Europeans degenerated in the tropical climate, and Sir James Ranald Martin, a highly respected expert on tropical medicine who authored later editions of the same work, stated that "the third generation of unmixed European is nowhere to be found in Bengal," an absence he attributed to "the physical degradation resulting from long residence in a hot and pestilential country." A health manual for British women in India gave its readers the unwelcome news that their children would "show early signs of degeneration of both body and mind." It alleged, "If a British family keeps its blood unalloyed, it dies out in a third generation." "I have seen the third generation of Europeans reared in Calcutta," declared Sir Joseph Fayrer, president of the medical board of the India Office, "but such are rare, and though there was no marked physical degeneration, yet there was that which would make one look with great misgiving on the prospects of a race so produced."^[38] This

[37] This concern is examined in my introduction to Richard F. Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains (Berkeley, 1991), xi-xii; and in David N. Livingstone, "Human Acclimatization: Perspectives on a Contested Field of Inquiry in Science, Medicine and Geography," History of Science 25 (1987): 359-94. For the parallel debate about degeneration in European society, see J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York, 1985); and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (Cambridge, 1989).

[38] Johnson, Influence of Tropical Climates , 10; Martin, Influence of Tropical Climates , 137, 97; Edward John Tilt, Health in India for British Women , 4th ed. (London, 1875), 108, 3; Sir Joseph Fayrer, Tropical Dysentery and Chronic Diarrhoea (London, 1881), 345. An especially full exposition of the theory of European degeneration in India can be found in Sir R. Havelock Charles, "Neurasthenia and Its Bearing on the Decay of Northern Peoples in India," Transactions of the Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 7, no. 1 (Nov. 1913): 2-31.

concluding clause, oblique though it may have been, was clear enough in intimating that the chief signs of degeneration were evident in something other than physical decay. Martin's use of the adjective "unmixed" and the health manual's reference to "unalloyed blood" made the point more explicitly. The specter of degeneration lay less in the threat of physical extinction than in the prospect of miscegenation and the loss of racial identity.

The policy implications of the problem of degeneration come through most clearly in the testimony to the select committee appointed by Parliament to consider the prospects for European settlement in India in the aftermath of the 1857 revolt. One of the central questions the committee asked was whether the climate of the Indian plains posed an insuperable barrier to permanent colonization. The medical and government witnesses were all but unanimous that it did. They insisted that the physical frame of the European could not withstand the effects of high temperatures and tropical diseases over the long term, and that because manual labor was virtually impossible, the range of opportunities for colonists would be drastically limited. The incantatory theme of degeneration appeared repeatedly in their testimony. Dr. Robert Baikie, the chief medical officer for the Nilgiris, cited the experience of the Portuguese as proof that a settler population would "die out in the third generation."^[39] Since the Portuguese in India certainly had not failed to produce biological heirs, it is quite clear that the phrase "die out" was meant in a metaphorical sense and referred to the devolution of notionally pure Portuguese colonists into the mixed-race Goan community. The fear that India would similarly incorporate the offspring of British colonists—alienating them from their national-cum-racial heritage—is apparent in Captain John Ouchterlony's lament that "even if children were reared to maturity [in India], their constitutions would be enfeebled, and the 'Saxon energy' impaired, and I believe that their progeny resulting from the intermarriages of colonists would be found deteriorated in all English or European attributes."^[40] For medical and administrative authorities in India, the risks of tropical degeneration were so fearsome that they precluded the possibility of a European settler population's surviving over several generations as Europeans.

[39] PP, First Report from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India) (1858), Session 1857-58, VII, pt. 1, 54.

[40] PP, Third Report from the Select Committee (1858), Session 1857-58, VII, pt. 1, 2.

Other witnesses did not share this gloomy assessment. Almost without exception, they were planters and other nonofficial Europeans who saw themselves as permanent residents of India. In a typical statement, the indigo planter John Saunders declared: "I have been 25 years [in India], and have never been seriously ill; and I have had 12 brothers and cousins residing in the same district, and I do not think that any one of them has ever suffered seriously from the climate."^[41] Another planter professed his good health but was less confident of the benefits for future generations: "I believe they deteriorate; the second and third generation would be inferior to the first."^[42] To guard against this danger, he sent his children back to Britain for their education, and he claimed that other planters did the same. Most of the nonofficial witnesses, however, insisted that India posed no environmental barrier to colonization. "The Bengal climate is a very fine climate," affirmed William Theobald, an agent for Bengal planters and merchants. "The doctors and some other people would make us afraid of it, . . . but I think we have a very comfortable existence. . . . I regard [the climate] as of no importance at all on the question of colonization and settlement."^[43] The disdain that the planters and traders felt for the supposed dangers of the tropical climate was motivated not merely by their personal cognizance of health but also by their communal appreciation of the political and economic advantages they stood to gain from an enlarged settler population. Much of their testimony revolved around the resentments they harbored against the Indian government for its policies regarding land tenure, the legal system, and other areas of conflict. From their perspective, colonization by additional Europeans offered the prospect of overturning those policies.

While the debate about tropical degeneration therefore possessed important political ramifications, these ramifications were inseparable in the minds of the climatic pessimists from the danger of racial decline. Their objections to permanent settlement derived not just from the political challenge that colonists posed but from the social precedent they set. Any significant increase in the colonist population was most likely to occur in

[41] PP, Fourth Report from the Select Committee (1858), Session 1857-58, VII, pt. 2, 219.

[42] Josiah Patrick Wise in PP, Second Report from the Select Committee (1858), Session 1857-58, VII, pt. 1, 62. A similar statement is offered by another indigo planter, James Thompson MacKenzie, in Second Report from the Select Committee (1858), Session 1857-58, VII, pt. 1, 100, 104.

[43] PP, First Report from the Select Committee (1858), Session 1857-58, VII, pt. 1, 56, 80.

the agricultural realm, where indigo and tea production offered the most successful examples of European enterprise. Yet the planters who pioneered these industries were notorious for their hard drinking, their rough treatment of workers, their brazen liaisons with Indian mistresses, and their plenteous sirings of mixed-race children.^[44] Blind though they might be to their own transgressions, they supplied the proponents of the degeneration theory with a stark example of the dangers posed by extended residence in the tropics. They were not, however, the only exemplars of this menace. By the mid-nineteenth century colonial authorities had become profoundly disturbed by the large number of European soldiers, vagrants, prostitutes, orphans, and others who haunted the periphery of British Indian society, exhibiting what these authorities regarded as the early manifestations of degeneration.^[45] Their fate was a salutary reminder that the entire European population stood at varying degrees of risk. Conventional opinion held that all women and children were imperiled by the biological weaknesses of their natures, while men were put at risk by the fortunes of their rank and the cravings of their sex. None could disregard the dangers of the tropics.

Within this context the medical discourse about hill stations had broad social significance. For the advocates of highland sanitaria, these remote retreats offered the only territorial means of escape from the subversive effects of the Indian environment. Time and again, witnesses before the select committee invoked the hills as havens from degeneration, and the committee itself concluded, "Few objects of contemplation can be more interesting [for European colonization] than the formation and progress of these establishments in the hills."^[46] British officials in India had come to see the hill stations as the only sites where they could establish a lasting presence without imperiling their physical and moral integrity.

Reinforcing the special appeal of the hill stations was the discomfort these places caused for the Indian servants, porters, and others who came there in search of employment. Especially in the early years, migrant

[44] See the scathing denunciation of the planters by G. O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah , 2d ed. (London, 1866), 262-81.

[45] See Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793-1905 (New York, 1980); David Arnold, "European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7, no. 2 (Jan. 1979): 104-27; David Arnold, "White Colonization and Labour in Nineteenth-Century India," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9, no. 2 (Jan. 1983): 133-58; and Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj .

[46] PP, Report from the Select Committee (1859), Session 2, V, iv.

laborers from the plains were poorly prepared for the climatic and institutional conditions in the hills, and they suffered from inadequate clothing and shelter. An early visitor to the Nilgiris observed, "When [servants'] pores and half-clothed bodies are exposed to the cold after the sun is down, they always become discontented and often very sick." Thomas Macaulay, who spent the season in Ootacamund a few years later, noted that his servants "are coughing and shivering all round me." The Bengali servants at Mussoorie were "very miserable," according to Emily Eden, sister of the governor-general Lord Auckland. "They had slept in the open air and were starved with the cold, and were so afraid of the precipices that they could not even go to the bazaar to buy food." Later, when Eden's Bengali maid began to cough and spit blood during a long stay in Simla, she commented, "I suppose this is a very bad Siberia to them."^[47] Siberia indeed. Whatever concern some Europeans may have felt for the sufferings of the Indian employees they took with them to the hill stations (and a great many felt none), the fact that these shivering servants did not do well in the highland climate served simply to reinforce the notion that this was a realm uniquely suited to the racial requirements of the British.

Invariably, then, the commentary on hill stations conflated medical and moral issues, imbuing the stations with the ability to restore not merely the physical health of Europeans but their social and ethical character as well. This view was especially evident in remarks about the British soldier, whose life on the plains was seen as so degraded that it threatened to undermine the entire European endeavor in India. Dr. William Curran, an Indian Army surgeon, argued that by stationing soldiers in the hills, authorities would "hear less of crime, and see scarcely anything of that intemperance, and of its possible consequence, insanity, which are now so comparatively common in our army in India." Similarly, an early enthusiast for the creation of a convalescent cantonment in the Nilgiris argued that "the climate would invite [soldiers] to manly sports, and to athletic exercises," rather than encouraging the alcoholic and sexual excesses that characterized their leisure time on the plains. The Nilgiris were thought by the Madras medical board to exert "a favorable moral influence. . . . [on] the European soldier, who is usually less under the influ-

[47] Lt. H. Jervis, Narrative of a Journey to the Falls of the Cavery with an Historical and Descriptive Account of the Neilgherry Hills (London, 1834), 47; Thomas Babington Macaulay, Letters , ed. Thomas Pinney, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1976), 68; Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters from India (1930; reprint London, 1984), 115, 173.

ence of moral impressions." Another expert explained that "the constant out-of-doors employment and recreation which [soldiers] would be enabled . . . to find and enjoy, would remove them from the influence of that most demoralizing of all agencies, the dull, monotonous irksomeness of the almost constant confinement to barracks, and of the life of utter idleness which they are compelled to in the plains."^[48] From this literature arose a quaint but revealing vision of the redemption of the British "Tommy" in a highland Arcadia, where he might eat fresh vegetables grown in his own garden, drink nutritious ale brewed from mountain spring water, and amuse himself in such innocent outdoor activities as collecting butterflies.^[49]

Roy Macleod has observed that "scientific knowledge, as applied through medicine, is not merely factual knowledge; it also comprises a set of social messages wrapped up in technical language."^[50] As is evident from the preceding analysis, the medical interest in hill stations harbored a special set of social messages. The discourse of the doctors may have been couched in the clinical vocabulary and derived from the empirical methods of an emerging scientific discipline, but it addressed a highly charged body of concerns about the precariousness of the European presence in colonial India. The climatic preoccupations of the medical fraternity were a kind of shorthand, comprehensible to all Europeans, for identifying these concerns and suggesting measures for their relief. For this reason the medical rationale for seeking health in the hill stations persisted long after the emergence of cholera, typhoid, and other epidemic diseases had shattered the illusion that the highland sanitaria were inviolable to the microbic perils

[48] William Curran, "Further Evidence in Favour of a Hill Residence for European Soldiers in India," Irish Journal of Medical Science 52, no. 104 (1871): 415; Major William Murray, An Account of the Neilgherries, or, Blue Mountains of Coimbatore, in Southern India (London, 1834), 27; Medical Board Office, Madras Presidency, Report on the Medical Topography and Statistics of Neilgherry Hills (Madras, 1844), 32; Capt. J. Ouchterlony, Geographical and Statistical Memoir of a Survey of the Neilgherry Mountains (Madras, 1868), 66.

[49] This vision was not as far-fetched as it may seem. Visitors both to Darjeeling and to the Nilgiris tell of British soldiers who hunted butterflies to sell to tourists. See L. A. Waddell, Among the Himalayas (1899; reprint, Delhi, 1979), 40; and E. F. Burton, An Indian Olio (London, 1888), 128.

[50] Roy Macleod, "Introduction," in Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion , ed. Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis (London and New York, 1988), 1. Arnold makes much the same point throughout Colonizing the Body .

of India.^[51] The recommendation that the British withdraw from the heat of the plains and establish seasonal domicile in the distant hills had something more than a strictly somatic intent; it served the symbolic purpose of inscribing the social distance between the British and their Indian subjects on the landscape itself.

[51] See, for example, Sir Joseph Fayrer, "The Hill Stations of India as Health Resorts," British Medical Journal 1 (June 9, 1900): 1393-97; and F. M. Sandwith, "Hill Stations and Other Health Resorts in the British Tropics," Journal of Tropic al Medicine and Hygiene 10, no. 22 (Nov. 15, 1907): 361-70.